What You Need to Know About the Philippines' New President and His Promise to Kill Criminals

A version of this article appeared on VICE Australia.

Though an official result has yet to be announced in the Philippine presidential election, Rodrigo Duterte has clearly won after running a campaign as a political outsider who promised to literally kill the country's criminals.

The other candidates included Mar Roxas, the old-school Establishment candidate, and Grace Poe, with her rags-to-riches story. Then there was former–Vice President Jejomar Binay, a man whose family has ruled Makati—the financial services capital of the Philippines—for 29 years. Finally, there was cancer sufferer Miriam Defender Santiago, who showed such poor poll performance near the end of the campaign she was no longer considered a real contender.

Duterte was elected mayor of the southern city of Davao for the first of seven times in 1988, and then cleaned up its streets almost overnight—allegedly by arming local militias that quickly became death squads. He also became known for his publicity stunt—he patrolled his city in a Harley-Davidson, then from inside a taxi after drivers started getting robbed. He also left his own home to help his neighbors first when the city flooded in 1994, and once forced a tourist smoking in a non-smoking area of a restaurant to eat his own cigarette at gunpoint.

Human Rights Watch has been investigating Duterte and the Davao Death Squad (DDS) for years, having recorded 1,424 deaths committed by the DDS and copycat groups. So far no one has been able to positively connect Duterte to the murders, although some involved in the investigation are convinced Duterte was involved.

Duterte's election video was made on a budget, but the soundtrack is enormous.

VICE was unable to contact Duterte's campaign to ask about these stories, but he hasn't exactly downplayed his image as a man who would rule with an iron first.

"A thousand [bodies] will become one hundred thousand," he once promised the country's criminals. "I will fatten the fish in Manila Bay. That's where I will throw your bodies."

Duterte said he would order the deaths of his own children if they were involved in the drugs trade. He has promised to disband congress to create a revolutionary government. He would issue "one thousand pardons a day" to officers who murdered drug dealers, he said, and then pardon himself of any crimes he may have committed at the end of his presidential term.

This hasn't harmed his popularity. In fact, even a rape joke scandal couldn't sink Duterte. In the weeks leading up to election day, Duterte gave a speech about how he fantasized about raping 36-year-old nun Jacqueline Hamil, who was murdered by inmates during a prison riot in 1989. When Australian and US diplomats protested such talk, Duterte threatened to cut ties.

None of it mattered because to the ordinary Filipino, Duterte was an outsider candidate—free from the corrupt dynasties who have ruled the country for so long. It earned him the fanatical support of lower- and middle-class Filipinos who, throughout the election, would wait up to six hours to hear him give the same hour-long speech he's given all over the country. (He has been compared to Trump, although Duterte himself thinks Trump is a bigot.)

"If this is a protest vote, the problem is the Philippines will have to live with Duterte's regime for six years," says Pauline Eadie, a Philippines watcher with the University of Nottingham. "If he improves the peace and order situation across the Philippines, then all well and good. If he manages to improve the lot of the poor, then even better.

"But the danger is that his lack of governmental experience at a national level will hinder him. If he does not control the situation, then the traditional elites will be ready to capitalize on his failings."

Some, like Dr. Aries Arugay, a political scientist with the University of Philippines-Diliman, are warning of the possibility for a coup—a not unlikely scenario given what those closer to the establishment have been saying.

"Coup attempts in the Philippines have always been launched by a small minority of civilian and military elites," Arugay says. "[Duterte] is challenging the elitist nature of Philippine democracy and its reliance on the goodness of its political class. [He] is becoming a catalyst to reexamine the type of democracy the Philippines currently possess."

And if it goes down that way, it could make for tragedy in a country just three decades and two revolutions out from an American-backed dictatorship.

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